A great guest room combines the best qualities of a luxury hotel room with those personalized touches that make your home your special place. Ultimately, hotel guests like to feel as comfortable when away as they do in their own home. In fact, often they like to feel a little more spoiled than their home environment allows. Here are a few extra things you can do to ensure your guests are relaxed, content and settled.

Color me perfect

Even when travel arrangements go smoothly (and they often don’t) for travelers there’s a degree of stress associated with getting from point A to point B and dealing with unfamiliar surroundings, so start by considering the use of calming and soothing colors in your guest rooms, such as using shades of blue and green for example. You don’t have to redecorate every room in order to do this. If white or cream are the staple choices for wall and ceiling colors, and they are in good decorative order, then you can either single out a feature wall for special treatment, or simply accessorize the contents with cushions or throws to give the room some character and warmth. Ultimately, classic, attractive colors will make most people feel at home. 

Update the décor

Don’t be afraid to refresh rooms on a regular basis – this doesn’t need to be an expensive or time-consuming exercise, as it’s amazing what you can achieve if you simply add a bright new rug, a fun contemporary bedside lamp, or a chic ottoman.

If guest room windows are looking a bit drab, why not improve the view by dressing them differently? Swap tired curtains and faded blinds for stylish interior Classic Poplar shutters – they provide an excellent frame for windows of any style, in houses of any age or character, so you really can’t go wrong. Plus shutters now come in a wide range of colors, and you can choose varieties with movable louvers to help control the level of light in your guest bedrooms – perfect if your visitors would like an afternoon nap.

The adjoining bathroom

If providing en-suite facilities, make sure they are scrupulously clean and smell wonderful – most guests will expect personal soap, shampoo and shower or bath gel, all of which makes a world of difference. Add a little jar of potpourri, scented miniature candles or joss sticks for a lovely and thoughtful touch.

Fresh flowers or fruit on a table and a few books that are good vacation reads will add the final touches to your carefully crafted interior design ideas, if you are aiming to create a room that feels like “home away from home”. The same goes for drinking water and tea or coffee making services – these can be very welcome additions to guest accommodations.

Perhaps the most useful yardstick when it comes to anticipating what guests might want is personal experience – when you think about your own preferences, you are on the right track to getting it right for other people.